A Complete Explanation Of Everything

Some quick notes on my reading while I was away in France.

I finished off the biograghy of Mao: Mao - The Unknown Story, which really was a fascinating read. I had a peripheral knowledge of Maoism up to reading this tome, weighing in at 750 totally untedious pages but it really sets the scene with frank dissection of the negative nature of both the personality and policy of Mao. Written by Jon Halliday and Jung Chang, if there is a criticism to be made, it smacks of a one sided rhetoric and ideology that is hypercritical of the precepts of Communism in general even whilst admitting that Mao was no scholar of Marxism. It's in the little asides down through the years, reportedly attributed to Mao and supposedly drawn from his private memoirs that the most colour is given to the book and the frightening spectre of the totalitarian dictatorial state and personality cult that Mao built up and espoused is created. A fascinating read in any case with a huge amount of detail on his early career and how China came to be under the axis of the CCP.

Second up, was the third Dave Eggers' book which I've personally consumed although I believe it is his fourth book, entitled: What is the what? I was a big fan of Eggers' second book, You shall know our velocity, which brought a really manic nervous energy to the idea of travel and was very human. What is the what? should have been straight in this mould as it is a semi-fictional account of a Sudanese refugee's flight to Egypt and later America during the early eruption of the crisis in that region. The notion is that the author has listened to the protagonists anecdotes time and again but has drawn them into a story and a timeline that is not entirely accurate or includes embellishment. And I don't like this book I have to say. Although why I'm saying that might be a little difficult to understand, I believe it sets out to try and understand the heart of spirituality, what drives human existence from basic sweatshop immigrant toil in the United States to evading lions and Arabs and pure starvation in Africa. And somewhere along the way, the narrative descended into pure background whining. Maybe there is too much of a cultural divide between a man from Sudan and a man from Western Europe to find much commonality on. Maybe I was just plainly uncomfortable with the heavy focus on religion throughout, maybe Eggers stayed true to the subject matter and how it was related to him. Either way, I was left with the impression of a clumsy stab at depicting the immutable essence of what it is to be human. But at least the proceeds when to Sudanese refugees so it wasn't a dead loss.